Winkels, Veronika14 Articles at Lifeissues.net

Veronika Winkels has just completed her BA and intends to continue studies in Science and Religion. Recently married, she and her husband have aspirations towards working in New Media and Australian Film. (2014)

Articles

As the full-time mother of two young children with a third on the way - all of us largely dependent on my breadwinner husband - I find myself in the middle of a cultural debate about women, caregiving and paid work that seems to put me on the losing side.

There are some who say children rob you of your youth. Perhaps this belief is even influencing the trend of Western women putting off having kids till later in life. Though the delaying of motherhood is explained by demographers in various other ways, it could also betray a kind of pathology in women, persuading them to expend their youth before their children can.

Overturning the judges' ruling could encourage real help for pregnant women. Perhaps the voices we need to pay more attention to right now are those of women who have the courage to openly acknowledge that their abortions brought them indescribable grief, and that they regret them. That group of women is a large one. Roe v. Wade made it a large one.

I do not think that teaching my children they can do anything they want to do, or be anything they want to be, is overly useful to them. Instead, I intend to teach them that they have some purpose in life, that they must seek it and, having once discovered it, put all their energies into it.

As I sat, gazing upon his small body, somewhat lost amongst the plethora of cords and tubes coming off or out of him, I found my love for him to be almost overwhelming. There's something almost supernatural about a new baby; they seem to possess a wisdom that the rest of us have lost.

Good moral values and virtues can take many years to establish in a person. Exposing children to the type of visual message in question here is like euthanizing their purity of imagination and innocence of childhood.